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Ebook Download Fighters in the Shadows: a New History of The FIGHTERS IN THE SHADOWS: A NEW HISTORY OF THE FRENCH RESISTANCE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Robert Gildea | 608 pages | 07 Jul 2016 | FABER & FABER | 9780571280360 | English | London, United Kingdom BOOK REVIEW: 'Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance' - Washington Times On the ground in occupied Europe, resistance movements conducted operations on two fronts. First, they fought the Nazis and any fascist collaborators from their own country. Secondly, they fought other resistance groups that did not share their vision of a future government. It is not surprising that most of the records from the SOE and the OSS focus on the Allied assistance in attacking the Nazis, the Italians, and any fascist collaborators. After all, the role of the members of the SOE and the OSS in occupied Europe was to guide guerrilla operations and provide logistical support to the resistance. They were there to defeat the Nazis. While the SOE and OSS reports do have some descriptions of the complicated political and personal loyalties that were part of the resistance movements in Nazi occupied Europe, they are not complete. Participation in any type of resistance during the Nazi occupation threatened more than the lives of the participants. It always meant risking the lives of immediate family and, in many cases across Europe, the lives of innocents from the villages nearest acts of resistance. The Resistance members made decisions based on hatred for the occupation and the risks or gains from collaboration; they made those decisions over and over again each time they decided to act. French citizens in both occupied France and Vichy France had to decide to be members of the resistance, support the resistance, remain neutral, or collaborate with the Nazis. Beginning in the s, members of the resistance movements wrote their memoirs at the same time as the SOE and OSS operators. Memoirs of resistants were seldom translated into English. Jones focuses on one set of Allied operations—the Jedburgh teams that were assembled prior to D-Day. Gildea covers the entire period of the Nazi occupation of France from until , while Jones spends the majority of his book on the period from the entrance of US forces into the war in Europe in early through the complete liberation of France in late Both authors use archival research from the most commonly used primary sources SOE, OSS, and Allied war records as well as far more obscure material from French national and provincial archives and German military records from the occupation. The use of archival material in both books adds greater clarity to the individual choices during the Resistance and underscores the deep courage exemplified by those involved. Gildea, a professor of modern history at Oxford University and author of another work on the French Resistance entitled Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation Picador, , also describes French post-war politics that overshadowed stories of the many resistance movements and their members. Gildea shows that the decisions to become involved in the French Resistance were not based on a single motivation, and that the members of the resistance were not all French. This meant sabotage and subversion were the primary missions of virtually every French resistance unit supported by the SOE. These were made up of French citizens who resisted the occupation through espionage. The best known of these was Combat , the resistance newspaper in Paris. Like Gildea, Jones is a respected scholar in the area of special operations and, most especially, in special operations in France during World War II. Jones describes the Jedburgh teams as made up of three individuals—two special operators and one communicator. These individuals would parachute into France in military uniform and act as liaison elements with the Free French resistance units, serving as communications links between the Free French resistance units and Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces SHAEF headquarters and providing logistics support— designing and implementing plans for air drops of supplies to the resistance. Jones divides each chapter of his book into discussions of resistance operations in France and, separately, the complex political machinations taking place inside the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces SHAEF and between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill regarding the liberation of France. This style of moving back and forth from the tactical operations on the ground to the strategic challenges in London and Washington makes for challenging reading. De Gaulle insisted that his own representative take command of Resistance operations in France and further insisted that he be placed in charge of all Allied operations in occupied France. As a conventional French Army armor officer with little experience in unconventional warfare, Koenig was, however, loyal to de Gaulle and that was most critical. The tensions created by the addition of Koenig resulted in the departure of the senior SOE officer, Brig. Eric E. As a result of these tensions, Koenig—while commander of the Jedburgh program and nominally the commander of SFHQ—remained unaware of other established Allied intelligence operations in France and in the rest of Europe that were conducted without his knowledge or approval. As this work takes the reader through the design and implementation of the Jedburgh program leading up to D-Day, mixing the difficulties of producing teams; obtaining the necessary weapons, equipment, and air frames to deliver them; counterintelligence worries; and the in- fighting taking place between Washington, London, and Algiers where de Gaulle had established the French government-in-exile , it seems a wonder that any Jedburgh operations were ever conducted. In fact, operations just prior to OVERLORD and throughout the summer of were exceptionally successful from a strategic perspective, destroying critical infrastructure and tying up German military resources throughout France, when those resources could have been used to fight the Allied advances. While the Gildea and Jones books advance our understanding of the resistance to the Nazi occupation, neither book discusses the extensive intelligence collection operations that also took place in Occupied France. In , SIS intelligence officers were inserted into France by various clandestine means with the mission to build intelligence networks reporting on the Nazi occupation. There are many lessons that can be gleaned from books on the challenges of intelligence and special operations in Nazi-occupied Europe, and these lessons are delivered best when they focus on the political complexities of the European resistance movements, rather than on dramatic combat operations behind Nazi lines. Together, Gildea and Jones highlight several striking lessons. First, special operations teams inserted into occupied France to support the resistance had a very different view of their mission from that of their colleagues in the resistance. Both Gildea and Jones make it clear that, by the time the SOE and OSS were sending units into occupied France, the resistance movements in France were less interested in defeating the Nazis than in insuring a specific type of future France. Second, and corollary to this first lesson, is the counterintelligence lesson. Throughout the European theater in World War II, resistance leaders often used selective intelligence production and outright deception as a means to gain Allied support and undermine Allied support to their political adversaries. While successful resistance operations were almost always a result of excellent local intelligence collection, it is also true that most of the failures— and especially the capture of SOE and OSS teams—were the result of the actions of traitors from within the resistance network. Both Gildea and Jones note that resistance movements rarely had an interest in operational security, beyond avoiding capture by the Nazis. Gildea points out the only resistance movement in France that had any operational security awareness was the communist resistance, but only because of the history of anti-communist operations by the French government in the s. Finally, there will always be logistics challenges in supporting resistance movements, and it is critical that special operators recognize this before they promise any support to a resistance movement. As SOE and OSS gained traction inside France and in other parts of occupied Europe, the demands for personnel, weapons, ammunition, and equipment quickly outpaced the capabilities of the Carpetbaggers. As Max Hastings states in his recent article, World War II remains an event that historians continue to analyze with great success. This is partly because even as the number of World War II veterans who could serve as primary sources decreases, the number of potential archival sources increases. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this journal are those of the authors. This was not a fiction about something that never happened, but rather a story that served the purposes of France as it emerged from the war. It was a founding myth that allowed the French to reinvent themselves. In order to circumvent this narrative, Gildea bases his book on personal testimony, both written and oral, and this use of first-person accounts lends a rare freshness and raw emotion to a familiar story. After the fall of France in , Charles de Gaulle and his Free French were a small and powerless
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